Playing Video Games as a Novel Strategy to Improve Emotional Self-Regulation as a Mechanism for Building Resilience to Everyday Life Stresses

Supervisor: Dr Cody Phillips

Daily stressors are an unavoidable aspect of everyday modern life. Unlike overwhelming traumatic events, everyday life stresses are typically brief experiences of adversity that temporarily challenge our state of psychological wellbeing. If not managed, the cumulative effects of daily stress can lead to chronic stress, which may contribute to psychological and physiological dysfunction. Building resilience has been demonstrated to enhance individual’s capacity to adaptively cope and reduce the effects of stress. While resilience training programs and psychotherapy interventions exist, they often require substantial time, effort, and cost, limiting their general accessibility. Although evidence suggests that commercial video games enhance resilience building skills, their potential as a brief, accessible intervention for emotional self-regulation remains underexplored.  Emotional self-regulation is essential for managing stressful emotional arousal, disrupting maladaptive rumination, and restoring cognitive flexibility, thereby promoting adaptive stress management. Adults were chosen as the primary focus of this research due to the high stressors associated with personal and professional pressures in adulthood. This work investigates the efficacy of brief commercial video game play in facilitating self-regulation as an initial step in resilience-building. The ‘window of tolerance’ framework was applied to understand the role of emotional self-regulation in recovering from states of distress. By downregulating heightened emotional responses, individuals may restore executive functioning and re-engage in self-awareness, cognitive reappraisal, and problem solving—processes that support resilience building. A comprehensive literature review indicates that short-duration gameplay has potential to attenuate stress reactivity, expedite the return to homeostatic equilibrium, and enhance an individual’s capacity to engage in effective coping mechanisms. Future research should examine the optimal game types and play duration necessary to afford these benefits and establish commercial video games as a structured, evidence-based tool for stress management and resilience building.